Program Notes

"The Symphony for Thirteen Players, featuring one each of the principal orchestral instruments, was composed for Vic Firth and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players. Its world premiere was given last November [sic] at the Music Today Series, conducted by Gerard Schwarz. The percussion writing, a tour de force for a single player, is dramatically prominent in each of the work's three movements and highlighted by a long snare drum cadenza as the Trio of the second movement. The first movement is a sonata; the second, a scherzo-trio; and the third, a rondo."

—William Thomas McKinley (© 1984), from 15 Oct 1984 program.

"Victor Firth, principal percussionist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, likes to hear jazz drummers and so he makes the rounds of the Boston clubs. Often, he had heard composer/pianist William Thomas McKinley with drummers like Roy Haynes and Billy Hart. Knowing McKinley slightly on a collegial basis–they both teach at the New England Conservatory–Firth struck up a friendship with Tom, as he is known in jazz circles, who proposed a work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber Players with whom Firth also performs. Firth told him to go ahead–a friendly commission–and McKinley, over a three-year period, finally responded with a work actually not begun until the winter of 1981-82 and finished until late winter, 1982-83. McKinley, who writes in numerous dialects from jazz to Expressionism, initially conceived of the Symphony for Thirteen Instruments as a three-movement chamber work scored for single winds, strings, and six percussion instruments. The idea of a jazz-related language crept in as Firth talked about improvisation. But Firth, a fine soloist, is not a jazz drummer. The percussion, featured prominently in the work, often initiate ideas or carry the rhythmic thread. From time to time, other instruments perform fairly substantial parts, too, but as the work progressed, it began to resemble a concerto more and more. The percussion is not treated flamboyantly by any measure: the work calls for only two instruments per movement so that the percussionist need not dive from one part of the orchestra floor to another. So the Symphony is not really a concerto in the usual sense of the word. The drums have a part somewhat analogous to the viola in Berlioz's symphony, and McKinley, rather whimsically, has begun to refer to his work as 'Victor in Boston.' McKinley has not written a collage; he does not copy progressions from Schubert or Mahler; he does not serialize atonal sonorities; he does not reiterate the same chord in different ways ad infinitum; nor does he use jazz cliches. But jazz plays an important part in the development of the work's harmonic language. McKinley notes that he uses Beethovenian structural elements, themes, and developments of harmonic features that originate in Impressionism, jazz, and early Stravinsky. The rich harmonic vocabulary derives from expansions and extensions of triadically-based sonorities found in Ravel and Debussy and then in the jazz of musicians like Gil and Bill Evans, pushed to the nth degree and treated somewhat in the manner of the progressive tonality of the late-Romantic symphony. The Adagio of the first movement serves as Introduction to an Allegro that unfolds as a sonata form with clear primary and secondary groups (the latter beginning with a trumpet theme). After a Development and Recapitulation, the Adagio returns as Coda.

"A Scherzo follows. Its Trio, centerpiece of the symphony, features a virtuosic snare-drum cadenza. A fast, straightforward Rondo, ABACABA, brings the symphony to a close."

—Peter Eliot Stone (© 1983), from 19 Oct 1983 program.